The United States Senate deals with a wide range of issues, both foreign and domestic, but the ones that preoccupied Rick Santorum the most during his tenure appear to have been gynecological. An examination of the surging GOP presidential contender’s record using the Sunlight Foundation’s Capitol Words (LINK) reveals the degree to which Santorum favored topics such as abortion, fetuses and wombs when he was serving in Congress’ upper chamber.

According to our analysis, between January 1, 1996 and January 3, 2007 (his last day as a member of the Senate), the then-junior senator from Pennsylvania spoke the following words more than anybody else in the Senate: abortion, partial-birth, fetus, fetal, womb. He also uttered the following phrases more than anyone else: “base of the skull,” and “life of the mother.”

Total Santorum utterances
(1/1/1996-1/3/2007)

Total Senate utterances
(1/1/1996-1/3/2007)

Santorum %

Rank

abortion

1014

8328

12.2%

#1

partial-birth

379

1787

21.2%

#1

fetus

145

780

18.6%

#1

“partial birth”

116

466

24.9%

#1

fetal

99

1134

8.7%

#1

womb

90

369

24.4%

#1

“base of the skull”

34

48

70.8%

#1

“life of the mother”

74

307

24.1%

#1

Though he was just one of 100 senators, Santorum was responsible for approximately one of eight utterances of “abortion” during the ten years covered by our analysis, and approximately one in five utterances of “fetus” and “partial-birth.”

As a Senator, Santorum was the sponsor of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, which criminalized the so-called “partial-birth abortion,” as opponents term a controversial procedure for ending late-term pregnancies. Doctors who perform this procedure now face a fine and up to two years in prison. He was also a co-sponsor of a number of bills that would have prohibited children from crossing state lines to receive an abortion, and would have required abortion providers to tell pregnant women aware that the abortion will cause their unborn child pain.

The numbers in this post were generated using Capitol Words, a Sunlight Foundation project that analyzes the frequency with which different terms appear in the Congressional Record. We used the Capitol Words API to calculate how often Sen. Santorum used each phrase versus the entire Senate during the time periods in which Santorum was in office and for which we have data. An example query is: